Goncalvo de Santiago

Goncalvo de Santiago y Velazquez de Cuellar (1500-) was a conquistador in the service of Spain. Santiago was responsible for the conquest of much of present-day Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala in the late 1530s, and is the founder of the city of Tegucigalpa (formerly Tlacochcalpan) and Quirigua.

Biography
Goncalvo Santiago was born in Santiago de Compostela to a Galician family in 1500, and he became a soldier of the Spanish Army. Religious, he was known to be a drillmaster and was a promising commander for service in the army of King Charles I of Spain. In 1525, Santiago arrived in Cuba to serve under Viceroy Diego Velazquez de Cuellar, who adopted him as his son. This made Goncalvo the younger brother of Pedro Velazquez de Cuellar, the Governor of New Spain, and he became a man of much power due to his familiar connections.

At the time of his arrival, the Viceroyalty of New Spain was in the process of conquering the native empires of Central America, and in 1536 Santiago gained the permission of his father to lead an expedition to another part of the New World in search of the rumored "Seven Cities of Gold", such as "Cibola" and "El Dorado". He sailed to the southern parts of Central America, and he disembarked in a jungle area with 4,300 Spanish troops from Cuba. Santiago found that the natives in the area were friendly, and he named the new land "Nicaragua" as a composite word of chief Nicarao and "agua", meaning "water". Santiago continued on to the northwest, hoping to find out about any previous Spanish settlements on the coast. The friendly natives assisted him as warriors, and he gained two full armies under his command, one under Cristian de Managua.

In 1540, Santiago explored the old Columbian outpost of Punta de Caxinas on the shoreline as he marched. The village was on the coastline on a gulf that was deep, so he named the bay "Golfo de Honduras" ("Gulf of the Depths"). Santiago was angry to find that a group of hostile natives under Tutul Xiu had occupied the former Columbian outpost, and he massacred 2,630 native warriors and 275 civilians to maintain public order. Santiago renamed the town "Trujillo" after a town in the Caceres region of the Extremadura, where most of the conquistadores had hailed from. He then proceeded on his expedition as Cristian de Managua captured Tlacochcalpan in a siege from 1541-1542. The city was renamed Tegucigalpa by the Spanish, and it became the new capital of Spain's colony of Honduras.

In 1543, Santiago marched west with 13,200 Spanish and Indian troops to find the cities of gold that he had yet to find, but he came upon a new threat. He resolved attack the city of Quirigua, a city held by 4,940 hostile natives under Ix. He conquered the city without a real problem, and he linked the lands of Guatemala to the Yucatan, under conquest by Pedro Velazquez. Santiago continued his march west afterwards, setting out to assist his brother in his wars with the Mayans and more rebels.